MSI P6N Diamond - NV680i with X-Fi Audio

Not too far back, there was a time when it was inconceivable that a motherboard had anything other than a green or mustard colored PCB that had a few sockets for the CPU and DIMMs, maybe a hard drive connector or two, and a floppy drive connection. Keyboards and mice were typically PS/2 based, although a COM port sufficed for those still attached to their serial mice, and the list of input/output options were quite few. The late 90's brought about the rise of the Universal Serial Bus, a new standard for interfacing with devices intended to retire legacy serial and parallel ports (although that still has yet to fully come about). Integrated LAN options as well as limited IGPs also began to expand the options of a motherboard, essentially making motherboards almost completely integrated, while taking sales away from third-party AIB vendors.

One final piece of the puzzle came about by adding audio to the mainboard, most often by the way of an audio CODEC chip. Up until now, a few companies had tried their hand at producing audio cards with mixed success. The king of add-in audio solutions, Creative Labs, held court by either outperforming or simply outpurchasing the competition, until they were left as the de-facto standard. The onrush of integrated components, however, lowered the demand for many of Creative's higher-end (and higher priced) audio cards. It's estimated that the retail sales of their discrete audio cards only accounted for 10% of their total sales number for 2006. Logically, to stay competitive and keep the Sound Blaster legacy alive, there was really only one direction to turn to; to get "creative" in the motherboard field as well.

On-board solutions from Creative Technology, as they are now known, are not necessarily new. Onboard versions of their Live! chipset have been around mostly on OEM boards for years, and the 24-bit Sound Blaster Live! has been promoted on some of the upper level boards in the last couple of years as a suitable replacement for gamers with support for 24 bit, 96 kHz surround audio and EAX Advanced HD. MSI was one of the first manufacturers to adopt it in the K8N SLI Platinum and it is MSI that again pushes the envelope by including an integrated solution based on the Creative X-Fi audio processor.